I am reminded of when PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard all decided to stop accepting payments for Wikileaks, after they published Collateral Murder. (I know many on the left now hate Wikileaks, but at the time these leaks were considered beneficial to the left wing, since it hit a Republican war–Iraq.)

There’s no question that the Daily Stormer amounts to Nazis, I’m not even going to say “neo,” but if you think this won’t be used against the left, well…

NY Governor Cuomo isn’t a Nazi, but he is one the biggest assholes around, having conspired to make sure that Democrats didn’t take control of the NY State legislature, for example, among many other strategies.

If the NYPD had had this law in 2011, nothing would happen to Nazis, but Occupy would’ve seen mass arrests for hate crimes against the rich. https://t.co/TiOAwa40Kg

Yeah. Look, historically, censorship laws and so on have always hit the left harder than the right. Any law which can be used against the left will be used against the left.

Protecting the rights of people you hate is the price of protecting your own rights. If you take rights from Nazis, you will be taking them from yourself. At the very least, be sure they are specifically targeted at Nazis, similar to Germany’s laws. If they aren’t, they will be used against you.

Concentrated private powers that censor are almost as bad as governments that censor. In some ways, it is worse, because we pretend that places like Facebook, Google, and Twitter are not commons, but private, and thus grant them immunity from things like the first amendment, even though they control most of what people see.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

I agree, once again, with this post. Censorship is not the way. Open, honest dialogue is the only way. Ideas are fought with ideas. If bad ideas are fought with Censorship, EVERYONE loses and not just a few. Echo Chambers are deafening, by definition. It’s tantamount to gazing at oneself in the mirror all day long. It’s a form of Group-Righteous Narcissism, imo.

The strategy of The Corporate Media is to use these rather feigned spectacles to corral, and Social Engineer, The Dolts into compliance with The Corporate State and soon to be Corporate Planet. Take note that The Media is adulating Corporate CEO’s & Generals for their defiance of Trump. Trump is a purposeful Stress Test to Shore Up The Ship against any True Popular Revolt that may manifest independently of The Deep State. After The Trump Stress Test, The Establishment will say to The Masses, and The Masses will graciously acquiesce, NO MORE POPULISM. And the victory will be complete and our extinction will be cemented.

Those who would kill the spirit of the First Amendment must eventually worry about the Second Amendment.

You can’t expect aggrieved people to just shut up and go away forever.

I have zero respect for those who only like the First Amendment when it is protecting THEIR freedom of speech. But I have known since law school days in the 80’s that for most Americans the built-in tensions of the First Amendment are just too complicated for most Americans to deal with.

While it’s correct that hate and censorship laws can be and have been and will be applied to the left (both actual Left and the ersatz) it’s simply false to assume that the First Amendment has ever been anything but selectively applied. “Freedom of Speech” has never — and I submit will never — mean a truly open forum, whether public or privately owned.

As we know, Blogtopia (h/t Skippy) is full to bursting with censorship.

There may be an ideal of Free Speech, but it realistically doesn’t exist more than marginally and temporarily.

Meanwhile what happened in Charlottesville was not ultimately an issue of Free Speech, nor was it about rational argument in the sacred Marketplace of Ideas.

Nazis don’t play that game, but they use its rules to play their own game. Their arguments aren’t rational, they’re emotional. Under certain circumstances (say with a political leadership that backs them or even just looks the other way) their emotional appeal can be very effective and cannot be countered rationally.

A counter appeal to emotion might be effective. Force is more typically necessary.

We’ve seen that Our Rulers will use force against any perceived threat from below. That they don’t use force against the Nazis indicates they don’t see them as a threat. That they do use force routinely against perceived leftists tells you where they see the actual threat to their rule coming from.

Please spare me your hand-wringing. None of you believe in Freedom of Speech. If a group of radicalized American Muslims decided to hold an ISIS rally none of you would be scrambling to point out that we better let them speak lest all of us suffer repression. You would simply call them terrorists and say they have no rights. Get serious about your moral righteousness. Its either Freedom of Speech for everyone or no one. Freedom of Speech for white guys only is about the long and the short of it when it comes to this crowd.

I think that some commenters are missing an important factor in “free speech.” When speech incites violence, it is no longer free. It costs everyone because, like any explosion, the damage/fallout is not confined to the target. That was dramatically clear in Charlottesville.

There is ample psychological research demonstrating a negative correlation between reason and emotion. The angrier we get; the less rational is our thinking. Insults and raised voices do not enhance thinking on any side of an issue. It can ignite murder.

The discussion should perhaps be better focused on how public policy can best achieve a balance between civil discourse, hate speech, and minimizing violence.

The Left, whatever that means today, are little more than running dogs for the liberal center, Their loser status shared with the center is much older and this Nazi hysteria puts them back in the news if little else. We used to mock and mostly ignore the white extremists because they were meaningless fringe morons but the snowflakes need them to appear powerful to spread paranoia and feed their resistance of Trump. This ploy isn’t working except among the already assimilated with most people recognizing the staged drama as a partisan production.

Stone Mountain is the next civil war like battle the snowflakes think is winnable but some are already calling for the removal of Washington and Jefferson for their sins. Mt Rushmore is an example of white male dominance and must be cleansed to make way for the utopian safe-space history that this cult demands.

So Tom, telling Poor White People for the past eight years or more that they’re privileged and should hand over the few crumbs they do have isn’t inciting violence? I recollect during the “protests” in North Carolina last year I viewed footage of some Poor White Slob getting off the elevator in a Parking Deck who had the Shit kicked out of him for no reason except he was White and he was there. They stripped him down and beat the shit out of him Reginald Denny Style. I’d say that’s inciting violence. There’s nothing like violence to incite violence.

What I’d like, and would condone, is for all The Thugs who prefer violence and like to fight to get together and David Duke it out and kill each other while the majority of others sit down and constructively talk through all the miasma. But that won’t happen because The Thugs, and Thugs come in all colors, are Cowards and prefer to single out those who are not violent.

Anyway, this is much to do about nothing. The majority of Americans are too busy serving their Rich Masters to pay too much attention to this Kabuki Theater. It’s not representative of most of America and it never will be no matter how hard The Establishment pushed this False narrative.

Doesn’t that also imply that the listener suffers impulse control difficulties?

How about when the same word, or its functional equivalent, incites one group to violence, but not another? Are we asking different groups to have different standards of self-control? How do we correct for that, and should we?

What I see is that we keep varying the standards for who can get violent, and for what. And that is a big problem.

And, I will add, I think a DAESH Rally would be AWESOME and would support it 100%. In fact, maybe the Alt-Right/White Nationalists/Nazis can join them since they have so much in common (they really do have a great deal in common) and hell, The Centrist Liberal Protesters can too since they’re inclined to not project the actions of a few Muslims to all Muslims but when it comes to Whites the actions of a few are projected to all Whites via the convenient trope of Systemic Racism. There’s no Systemic Muslimism though. Even White Homeless People are guilty for The Sins of The World according the Centrist Liberals. So, since the Centrist Liberals are willing to overlook the atrocities of Jihadists as well as the atrocities of Corporations and The American Military, I think they should march hand & hand with The Nazis and DAESH. Vice can cover the Freak Show. We Are Family………

On cavalier: I wish as much attention were paid to the sixteenth and seventeenth century Cavaliers’ influence on our history as the Puritans. The younger sons (and daughters) of British nobility who came to Virginia and the Carolinas to establish landed estates not unlike often replicas of their baronial estate homes in the south of England.

Call it cavalier if you wish, or perhaps even selective naivete, but I’ve long argued we all need to grow thicker skin: seven billion people on a planet that can barely sustain one. Do the math.

The Nazis had the right to march in Skokie, and they had the right to Peaceably Assemble in Charllotesville. The City might have asked them to post bond for potential damages but that’s about as far as they could go unless a judge could determine that the INTENT was to incite a riot.

That Cloudflare statement is incredible. The Charlottesville fallout is another click in the ratchet of corporate censorship or un-personing. When Mastercard cut off Wikileaks, there was perhaps the pretext that Wikileaks was publishing illegal leaks. Paypal cutting off Vdare.com looks like pure retaliation for political speech.

Lefties always say the left is equally or more a target, but I haven’t seen much evidence of this. Let me know when DNS hosts or Paypal shut down a commie rabble-rouser like Occupy Democrats. Was there anything like this level of retaliation when a Black Lives Matter activist murdered 5 police officers with a sniper rifle? Was there any at all? Hillary Clinton’s response was “we need to look more into implicit bias”.

I guess there’s the shitbag left that condones Antifa, etc, and then there’s the dwindling old-school left that’s for good wages and opposes middle east wars. I have no problem believing that Google would target the latter for suppression.

The point is that Our Rulers will actively and forcefully censor and suppress anything they consider a threat whenever they choose to, 1st A or no. 2nd A or no. 4th A or no. And none of the Bill of Rights applies to the private sector.

How is that difficult to understand?

If the Nazis are perceived to be a threat (they are not), they’ll be censored; if they don’t retreat to their hidey holes, they’ll be crushed. It’s not like brain surgery. It’s basic.

I was going to say, there is considerable overlap. Shitbag left shows up to someone else’s protest with a flamethrower, then denounces “Nazis”. Google has your back. Just don’t dare suggest that foreign scab labor is bad for workers.

It’s good to have ideals and positive goals but if you vote for Clintonites or support people who bring baseball bats to demonstrations they are little more than political talking points. They may even be hypocrisy because some of these snowflakes are pushing for a made for YouTube civil war.

There aren’t nearly enough of the white supremacists for a good show so the Deplorables are being taunted and provoked to get the desired reaction. Conservative folks aren’t taking the bait so the antifa militias may have to return to fighting with the cops.

I think it might be OK to demonstrate violently, and it might be OK to have an armed revolution.

But violence is a game-changer, and when you make the choice to be violent, you have abandoned civilized rules and adopted jungle rules. You have decided that you are willing to be violent to get what you want. You have also given your opponent the right to crush you with greater violence.

Most importantly, when you decide to be violent, you have forfeited the right to claim any moral purity vis a vis that opponent.

I’m not telling anybody how to act, just insisting that we all be honest about our own roles.

@ atcooper today the 756th person was shot by USian police since jan. 1, according to ‘killed by police on facebook’. the guardians ‘the counted quit counting at the end of 2016, but i never discovered their rationale. their filters had great information, although they usually lagged a bit as to figures. 1093 they’d reckoned in 2016.

The war on “politically incorrect” art and “cultural appropriation” has entered the realm of the theater of the absurd. Creative individuals are now subjected to the approval of the “people’s” (social media!?) Ministry of Culture before they are allowed to give their imaginations free reign. “Hateful stereotypes” must be aborted before they are born, assuming, of course, they are gestating in the first place. Artists cannot be trusted. The sensitivities of the most fragile and downtrodden amongst us shall rule. “The world must become a safe place for me and mine!” is the cry. The rest of us can go take a flying… Pathetic. Lenny Bruce, Frank Zappa, Abbie Hoffman and all the rest who risked jail and career for the right to speak and create freely must be turning over in their graves.

As wendy indicated, it’s probably not been too many days. The better question would have been:

How many days has it been since The Mainstream Media covered a cop killing a civilian?

Admittedly, it’s been quite a while, and I bet you and everyone else here knows why. Because The Mainstream Media is obsessed with Donald Trump and he’s obsessed with it. It’s Trump 24/7. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — this whole Trump Spectacle 24/7 is doing irreparable harm in so many ways. When it’s over, if it ever is and I’m beginning to doubt it will be any time soon, there is going to be an epidemic of PTSD. Not Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but rather, Post Trump Stress Disorder. It will be a Serious Malady listed in the DSM and Merck will develop a Designer Drug to treat it that, as one of many many side effects, will make your dick or vagina shrivel up and fall off but it will be worth Kenneth Frazier’s (Down Goes Frazier!!!) Bonus & Stock Options.

I’ve seen any executive take more power when they were president: all the Ds and all the Rs. And the Congress becomes increasingly chickenshit about checking that. Fault the Founding Fathers all you want about owning slaves but they were really worried about excessive war powers, and gave them to the Congress, not the president. But since WW2 Congress has never declared war; like I said: chickenshit.

This rise of online political vigilantism is worrisome. I get that people on the left want to strike back at the far right for engaging in the same behavior (doxxing, harassment campaigns, etc.) but they should think strategically about this. What will stop companies from refusing to host left-wing websites? What will stop right-wing vigilantes from trying to get leftists fired from their jobs? This is a dangerous slippery slope we are going down here.

Freedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

This is known as the imminence doctrine. Needless to say, this standard has been severely eroded since 9/11. As far as I know, a private company serving the public can not deny service to specific individuals and groups based on their beliefs. Such an argument is the same that would allow such firms to deny service say to a gay couple because of the owners’ anti-homosexual religious views.

I would also reiterate that our ruling classes of the rich and elites define violence. Violence is essentially anything we might do to them. The violence that they do to us is always called something else. Running a car into a crowd is certainly violence but so is forcing millions of Americans on to poor healthcare insurance that is too expensive to use. Violence is bailing out the rich after the 2008 meltdown to the tune of trillions while keeping wages stagnant for the rest of us, sending our jobs to China, and foreclosing on a million American families.

Anti-terrorism laws since 2001 have criminalized “material assistance”, including intangible assistance that might be seen as bolstering the terrorists. Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project (2010), for example, found training in peaceful resolution of conflict as “material assistance”. In effect, if what you say can be considered as bolstering the terrorists, it can be found criminal. The Supreme Court says that that doesn’t abrogate the 1st Amendment, but it’s hard for me to see how it doesn’t.

Tim Kruse’s ‘Right but Wrong’ essay at CP grudgingly admits that Trump is blowing holes in the liberal color-blind diversion that protects the deep systemic racism that the US is built on. As we have seem many people including some republicans need people to believe that white extremists are the most important manifestation of racism in our society and attention must be fixed on them.

According to Mitt Romney, Trump should “State forcefully and unequivocally that racists are 100% to blame for the murder and violence in Charlottesville.” This is a lie. Best summary and analysis of what did and didn’t happen in Charlottesville that I’ve encountered is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpvOy3xblgg

The police “disappeared” for about 2 hours, after “dispersing the crowds into each other”. Hence, the peak of the fighting between the 2 sides occurred immediately afterwards. DOJ is (finally) going to investigate and (apparently) prosecute authorities who allow rioting. However, if Trump is removed, I anticipate Sessions also being removed, hence more “lapses” of authorities; of course, Feds will have to take away more of our rights to fight against resurgent Nazis (whether or not antifah thugs are trying to beat them into a pulp.) (OK, I’m assuming Pence is Deep State asset.)

He kicked them off the internet and then wants credit for feeling bad about it. But if he really feels it is a dangerous power that “no person should have”, he should reconcile himself to the fact that he does in fact that power. And he demonstrated that power by using that power.

So if he wants to prevent the bad precedent he set from being used further and wider, he will have to counter-set his bad precedent by counter-setting the counter-bad precedent of letting the group back onto his part of the internet. If he doesn’t want to do that, then he deserves no credit for “feeling bad” about it. And he shouldn’t complain if the Search Engine Lords decide they don’t like the groups he hosts and decide to blind their Search Engines to his existence. (If indeed his company desires or even cares about findability on the Search Engines).

And other Internet Entry Way Lords will shut other people out of their on-ramps onto the Internet. Ian Welsh, Naked Capitalism and other such will be functionally banned over the years to come. Search Engine Lords will do it in secret by skewing search algorithms to prevent “Ina Welsh”, “Naked Capitalism” and other such sites from coming up in the first ten or twenty or fifty pages of search results. In much the same way that Digby for sure and Naked Capitalism maybe has secretly stealth-banned people from commenting on their internet threads.

One way to reduce information flow and access is targeted censorship, of course. But another way, on the Internet, is steady degradation of search functionality. Here on vacation at my brother’s house, on his clunky old computer and legacy programs, I believe I have just found a specific way in which Google actively suppresses information-finding in a stealth-vandalistic way in which Yahoo does not yet do so.

If you type in the name of something you are searching for, and you type “images” along with it; if it is something that images can exist for then both Google and Yahoo will present a bunch of lookable images. I notice that whereas Yahoo reveals the URL that every image came from, Google conCEALS and reFUSES to print the URL for ANY of “its” images. That is a way to prevent you from going back and seeing if there was anything interesting at the URLs which offered interesting images on the subject you inquired about.

Is this just an artifact of an old clunky computer and program? Or is this in fact a new Google degradation and decay? The hiding and censorship of URLs from which images are hoisted?

Is Google evil? Does Google deserve to be exterminated from existence and wiped off the face of the earth?

Well, I have looked a little more at how “yahoo” and “google” and “duckduckgo” present the images they find when I enter ” whatever images”.

Google will show the image and show very hiddenly the english name of the site the image came from, but not the URL for that site. So if you write down the name of that site for future referrence, and then the site goes extinct, you will never find it again. Also, if you left-click on the image you are looking at, it expands; which is nice.

Yahoo will show the image and show more plainly the URL of the site the image came from. If you write down the URL for that site as well as the name of that site, so you know what site that URL is attached to, you can still find the frozen remains of that site even if that site goes extinct. Because chances are good that past recordings of that site have been stored at The Internet Archive Wayback Machine. If you have the URL, you can type that in and find your extinct site. If you have only the NAME of the site, you can do nothing, because the Wayback Machine does not allow for searching for extinct sites by their names. So Yahoo is more informative than Google about how to find sites even after they have died at some future point. Clicking the picture won’t make it expand, though.

Duckduckgo will reveal the URL behind every picture also, just like Yahoo. Also, Duckduckgo will expand the image if you left-click on the image, just like Google. So Duckduckgo is best of the three for doing random-walk searches on a subject area by looking at images and their URLs.

This is a crab-sideways way to find out about a subject you are interested in, and it only works if the subject can have images taken about it. But as Google, and then other Search Engines work to degrade and destroy the ability to find things by searching for them on their Search Engines; looking at a bunch of images and the places they came from may be the only crab-sideways way to sneak into the information dumps.

By the way, Yves Smith has now circled back and disabled comments on all the posts at NaCap, going all the way back in time. I begin to think we would have been better served if she had left the offending threads up so we the readers could actually see what was happening so awful in the threads that she had to shut them down. But she has openly stated why it is she shut the threads down.